Friday, October 3, 2014

Those eagle-eyed or local enough to know that this picture is from well over a year ago will say 'This shop closed well over a year ago' and you would be right. I did. I used to work in this record shop. It was in Camden. Here it is empty and prior to redevelopment into a discounted linen outlet or similar... Wait, no it's in Camden. It'll be a shop selling Spanish tourist tat by now: rat-tail combs, flip flops, woven hooded tops and Rusted Root t-shirts, that kind of thing. If you squint, you can almost see the ghosts of some of the moodiest record shop staff in London. Fuck a shut down record shop.

In which Neil Young has seemingly discovered a time machine, gone back into the past, recorded an album, come back to the future and released it.

A few people have been keen to point out the irony, nee spasticity of releasing this album at the same time as launching your all guns blazing marketing push for an unfriendly Toblerone shaped uberMP3 or digital media player. A few people are right. It is as ridiculous as Chumbawamba recording a rousing version of Skrewdriver's 'White Rider'. But whatever, just because he is Canadian doesn't mean Neil Young has to be dull and predictable.

Rather than going into a studio or even recording with a stereo microphone our Neil has hooked himself up to one of those old fairground 'Record a record' thingamajigs. The gimmicky instant recording studios that apparently used to be part of the American fun-time landscape. Think Coney Island in black and white, before the war.

'A Letter Home' is an okay album, a perfectly listenable (if not intentionally lo-fi) collection of very obvious cover versions. Completely unessential, but when you have a devoted fan base the size of Neil Young's you are going to clear ten thousand in fan club completist sales alone.

Sheffield, sex city. Home of the Pyjama Jump, Frog and
Parrot, DefLeppard, the ‘hole in the
road’ round-a-bout, Steel City. This started as an attempt to record the former
premises of some of Sheffield’s twenty plus former record shops with camera
setting on non-specific smart phone but about three in I became so over-whelmed
with melancholy that I just started to roam the Threads like land-scape without
purpose.

This wasn’t just the fault of the crumbling neo-Brutalist
facades or failed Ski Village, It wasn’t because the former premises of Kenny’s
records have been taken over by a Halal butchers. The road to bewilderment in
the heart of Yorkshire started with a meet up with an old school friend, a
breakfast the size of Gordon Brown’s face and the news that someone I went to
school with had died of a heart attack. It was a breakfast meet rather than a
‘ladies who lunch’ situation due to the fact that my friend was also signing
on, a fellow dweller in that strange inbetweener land of sans job.

Anyway, the bitter-sweet collection of shots of former
records shops got cut short, didn’t happen, not to say this was a wasted trip.
Yes it started off shit. I popped into a record shop between the station and
Coles Corner (Yes.) and it was awful.

The kind of otherworldly pricing
structure that temporarily made me thing I was in-fact sitting on a goldmine
the size of which could buy me a small island… Made of gold, or really good
quality bacon.

Bacon Island is of course an imaginary place, a place so
fanciful that it can’t even be part of the most outlandish of non existent
other worlds. So that place done and dusted I moved on to my breakfast of
unemployed champions and then poked my head round the door in Rare and Racy in
an entirely obligatory manner.

I didn’t expect for a second to leave with anything
more than the smell of outlandishly high-brow used books in my nostrils. As it
happens I left with a British press of a Marion Brown album I’ve been chasing
for a while, a UK press of a Fela Kuti album I don’’t have (Yellow Fever) and
the posthumously released Coil NIN remix album. Chuffed as fuck I was.

Next came the real purpose of my jaunt up north, an annual
pilgrimage to chez Record Collector (See past notes for a full rundown of my
love and occasional ambivalence of this particular retailer). I was all ready
to sing the praises of this long standing stalwart of the record game, thinking
they’d had more than enough time to restock, get the good shit in, cram the
racks but no. Sorry but from the perspective of a used record whore none of the
glowing reviews can save this place. Sure, if you want a bit of the old ‘Record
Store Day’ or some new records it’s one of the go to places in Sheffield but as
far as a destination for my chiselling habits goes, this place is OPD as of
August 19th.

The front 2/3rds of the shop are NEW vinyl (with the
exception of static Folk and Indie sections. Whose stock hasn’t changed since
the birth of my first child.) The back of the shop is now where the ‘good
stuff’ is kept. I say good stuff but in reality the place has been strafed and
Discogged in equal measures. (By Discogged I mean the owner has seen fit to
pull anything even approaching half decent to punt it on the internet). So,
fuck this place.

A walk down the hill and through the botanical gardens led
me to the site of another former record shop Forever Changes. I had wrongly
assumed that due to it’s documentation on Google that it was still up and
running. It is not. From there I bowled back into town to another outfit that
relies souly on Record Store Day to give people a reason to shop and another place
that decided it would be closed. Cheers.

Regardless of the fact that I didn’t
get chance to shop the final store it was still worth the visit. I have no idea
what Vinyl Demand had in store for me but the mere fact that it has set up shop
on the ground floor of the formerly awesome and prestigious Grosvenor Hotel is
enough for me to high-five my own face. Along with the Hallam the Grosvenor was
the height of 60s fucking awesomeness a hotel for god knows what. I Imagine
human sacrifice, slippery fisting, class Alpha drugs and crooked deals between
bent cops and county council top bods. Anyway, the Grosvenor is marked for
demolition and part of it’s fair corpse is now inhabited by a closed record
shop.

So, disappointed like fuck I head to Chesterfield and discover
two things: Between Tall Bird Records and the Thursday market the selection
here was about as good as anything Sheffield had to offer.